David Williamson’s first memory is of Sydney. At three-and-a-half, the Melbourne born-and-bred playwright was visiting an uncle with his family, and remembers “sitting in a backyard on a very bright, sunny day, surrounded by bougainvilleas and subtropical flowers,” he says via Zoom from Provence, where’s he’s holidaying. “The fact my first memory was in Sydney obviously imprinted something on me about the exotic nature of the city: the colours, the brightness, the greenness of the grass.”
He contrasts this with Melbourne’s winter and summer brownness, while another early memory was gazing from a ferry at a harbour that “seemed a deep translucent green, not blue”. Hence the tile of his 1987 play Emerald City.
Although Williamson is eternally grateful to the Melbourne theatre companies that launched his career, he was less enamoured of that city’s critical response, which he thought misconstrued the very nature of his plays. “When the plays were done in Sydney, it was a totally different reaction,” he explains. “John Bell did a terrific production of The Removalists, and John Clark did a great production of Don’s Party, and I have to say that the talent at their disposal was probably greater, when you consider that I was playing the removalist in Melbourne, and Chris Haywood played him in Sydney…
“The critics were terrific, and they recognised the genre. The Melbourne critics thought The Removalists was an earnest play about police violence, that didn’t succeed because the characters weren’t three-dimensional. Whereas Sydney immediately saw it as a darkly satirical play about appalling Australian male behaviour.”
Williamson also wearied of his left-wing Carlton circle dimly viewing financial success, whereas in Sydney making money seemed “a legitimate pursuit”. He acknowledges Sydney’s shady history of “beleaguered convicts and corrupt prison guards, but,” he insists, “it was a vibrant and very Australian city. So I thought to myself, ‘Why do I have to put up with these Melbourne dinner parties where people start abusing me that I’ve sold out because my plays were being done in the state theatre companies, and because I might be making roughly as much money as a suburban GP?’”
He, his writer-wife Kristen and family moved to Sydney in 1979, arriving in time for John Bell’s production of Travelling North. They settled in Birchgrove, initially in a house without a harbour view, and then in 1987, the Emerald City year, in one that did.
“In Emerald City,” he says, “there’s a line that nobody questions the meaning of life in Sydney: it’s getting yourself a harbour frontage – and here I was at exactly that time, buying myself a harbor frontage. The press had a bit of fun with that: here’s Williamson satirising those poor souls who spend their lives chasing water frontages, and he’s done that himself. My only defence was the Woody Allen defence that a satirist is always prey to the same impulses he satirises – which I thought was a pretty neat way of trying to get out of it!”
In Emerald City he has Kate (based on Kristen) contemptuously viewing Sydney as teeming with crooks and hucksters, with money paramount. In the event, Williamson and Kristen enjoyed exciting lives here for the next 20 years, and Sydney quickly became the setting for his plays, including Sons of Cain, about the corruption in NSW Labor (“which got me into a lot of hot water”) before Emerald City satirised a competitive marriage in a fast-moving metropolis.
“It was like ships passing in the night,” he says of their hectic lives. “Kristen would be off to work at The National Times at seven in the morning, and socially we had to go to different functions. One time we hadn’t seen each other for quite a while, and we’d been invited to the same cocktail party, and suddenly I saw my wife there, and said, ‘Oh, I haven’t seen you for a while. How are things going?’ So we caught up with each other, not at home, but a bloody cocktail party.
“Sydney was a bit more about showing yourself off in public, which I was never very good at, or didn’t like because, being six foot seven-and-a half [two metres], no one in the cocktail room could miss me. I felt terribly self-conscious, and small talk wasn’t my strongest forte.”
By 1997, Sydney’s glamour and excitement were outweighed by noise, pollution, traffic and parking hassles. So the Williamsons moved to Noosa, a long-term holiday destination of theirs, where they could write while leading less stressful lives. By having a Sydney flat, they maintain friendships and connections, and so the circle is complete: back to the old Melbourne adage of Sydney being a nice place to visit, but…
Emerald City: Ensemble Theatre, until August 23.
https://www.ensemble.com.au/shows/emerald-city/